The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6 eBook

[The letter’s contents was presumably payment
for Lamb’s contribution to The Englishman’s
Magazine.]

LETTER 537

CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HAZLITT, JR.

[P.M. Sept. 13, 1831.]

Dear Wm—­We have a sick house, Mrs. Westw’ds
daughter in a fever, & Grandaughter in the meazles,
& it is better to see no company just now, but in
a week or two we shall be very glad to see you; come
at a hazard then, on a week day if you can, because
Sundays are stuffd up with friends on both parts of
this great ill-mix’d family. Your second
letter, dated 3d Sept’r, came not till Sund’y
& we staid at home in even’g in expectation
of seeing you. I have turned & twisted what you
ask’d me to do in my head, & am obliged to say
I can not undertake it—­but as a composition
for declining it, will you accept some verses which
I meditate to be addrest to you on your father, & prefixable
to your Life? Write me word that I may have ’em
ready against I see you some 10 days hence, when I
calculate the House will be uninfected. Send
your mother’s address.

If you are likely to be again at Cheshunt before that
time, on second thoughts, drop in here, & consult—­

Yours,

C.L.

Not a line is yet written—­so say, if I
shall do ’em.

[This is the only letter extant to the younger Hazlitt,
who was then nearly twenty. William Hazlitt,
the essayist, had died September 18, 1830. Lamb
was at his bedside. The memoir of him, by his
son, was prefixed to the Literary Remains in
1836, but no verses by Lamb accompanied it. When
this letter was last sold at Sotheby’s in June,
1902, a copy of verses was attached beginning—­

There
lives at Winterslow a man of such
Rare
talents and deep learning ...

in the handwriting of William Hazlitt. They bear
more traces of being Mary Lamb’s work than her
brother’s.]

LETTER 538

CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON

[P.M. October 24, 1831.]

To address an abdicated monarch is a nice point of
breeding. To give him his lost titles is to mock
him; to withhold ’em is to wound him. But
his Minister who falls with him may be gracefully
sympathetic. I do honestly feel for your diminution
of honors, and regret even the pleasing cares which
are part and parcel of greatness. Your magnanimous
submission, and the cheerful tone of your renunciation,
in a Letter which, without flattery, would have made
an “ARTICLE,” and which, rarely as I keep
letters, shall be preserved, comfort me a little.
Will it please, or plague you, to say that when your
Parcel came I damned it, for my pen was warming in
my hand at a ludicrous description of a Landscape of
an R.A., which I calculated upon sending you to morrow,
the last day you gave me. Now any one calling
in, or a letter coming, puts an end to my writing
for the day. Little did I think that the mandate
had gone out, so destructive to my occupation, so
relieving to the apprehensions of the whole body of
R.A.’s. So you see I had not quitted the
ship while a plank was remaining.